Honduras, Economics & MigrationThis
fall, as Witness for Peace Mid-Atlantic gets ready to host our annual speaker's tour in November (this year with Nectali Rodezno from the National Front of Lawyers Against the Coup in Honduras), we will be coming together to explore the links between the struggles here in the U.S. for immigrant rights and the fight against the unfair trade policies that push migration in the first place.

The
coup in Honduras in June 2009 has deep economic and corporate ties.
Honduras is one of the key places where the labor of workers is
exploited by multinational corporations, and the oligarchy which has
controlled the state for generations has ensured an abysmally low
minimum wage.

President Manuel Zelaya Rosales, who was ousted in a
military coup orchestrated by the School of the Americas (SOA)-trained
General Romeo Vasquez Velasquez, among several other SOA graduates, had
lifted the minimum wage 60%. The strong, organized labor and social
justice movements had pushed Zelaya to enact such reforms, and his
willingness to listen to the Honduran people (rather than foreign
investors) frightened the oligarchy -- and their backers in the United
States -- so much that they perpetrated a coup. This
is just one piece of the landscape of one country that sends migrants north to the United States -- roughly one million according to the U.S. state department. This October, we will be holding film discussions and creating dialogue poems in universities, community groups and solidarity organizations all across the region. In the next few days we’ll have the organizers’ guide (including ideas for actions with your poems) and an instructional video up online, so keep your eyes out for that and let us know what you organize in your community!